Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man |...

Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man | Dalton Fury | Enter the spine-tingling world of Delta Force

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Kill Bin Laden: A ...

	Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man Dalton Fury St. Martin's Press, 2008 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

The mission was to kill the most wanted man in the world--an operation of such magnitude that it couldn?t be handled by just any military or intelligence force. The best America had to offer was needed. As such, the task was handed to roughly forty members of America?s supersecret counterterrorist unit formerly known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta; more popularly, the elite and mysterious unit Delta Force.
The American generals were flexible. A swatch of hair, a drop of blood, or simply a severed finger wrapped in plastic would be sufficient. Delta's orders were to go into harm's way and prove to the world bin Laden had been terminated.
These Delta warriors had help: a dozen of the British Queen?s elite commandos, another dozen or so Army Green Berets, and six intelligence operatives from the CIA who laid the groundwork by providing cash, guns, bullets, intelligence, and interrogation skills to this clandestine military force. Together, this team waged modern siege of epic proportions against bin Laden and his seemingly impenetrable cave sanctuary burrowed deep inside the Spin Ghar Mountain range in eastern Afghanistan.
Over the years, since the battle ended, scores of news stories have surfaced offering tidbits of information about what actually happened in Tora Bora. Most of it is conjecture and speculation.
This is the real story of the operation, the first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora, and the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers. Lastly, this is an extremely rare inside look at the shadowy world of Delta Force and a detailed account of these warriors in battle.

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Fascinating

Dalton Fury (who ever he may be) has written an absolutely outstanding account of the hunt for Bin Laden. I've never read this kind of book before but it gave me a fascinating insight into what these guys go through. And it must be infuriating for these "real men" to have to deal with the incompetence of the dimwits above them who have no idea what really goes on in warfare. It makes the book impossible to put down as you read about the frustrating incompetence that these guys have to put up with.
Really really good.

Enter the spine-tingling world of Delta Force

Bravo for the author Fury...

I see that other reviewers have highly detailed the gist of the story, so I'll state little more than I found the book to be excellent. I received it yesterday and I got so caught up in the story that I read it through to the last page at 3AM this morning. A gripping read that I could not postpone finishing...for sure, any reader should come away in awe at the life and death adventures of these physicial supermen! While reading, I kept thinking: I'm surely glad Fury and his team were on our side!

If you enjoy learning about the inner-workings of our commandos, or discovering what really happened in the mountains of Tora Bora during the great hunt for Ossama Bin Laden, then this is the book for you.

One Question: I would like to know if other readers were left wondering about the information gotten from Afghani Gul Ahmed, whose thrilling capture was revealed in the first chapter. I failed to find the outcome of his interrogation -- Did Gul Ahmed reveal important information? Was Bin Laden wounded? Did Gul Ahmed shelter him? Where is Gul Ahmed today?

Despite this one minor oversight, author Fury has written an excellent account of a very important event. Mayada, Daughter of Iraq: One Woman's Survival Under Saddam Hussein.

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Over-Hyped by Marketing, Excellent for Students of SOF

This book has been very heavily over-sold by the publisher and will disappoint those who are expecting something other than a professional account of a professional mission with all its warts.

This is a very fine first person account with ample detail that I for one found very rewarding and worthy of both my time and money (the book is very reasonably priced). The reader will benefit from first reading the reviews of the books I list at the end--one would never know from this account that Rumsfeld gave the Pakistani's an air corridor to evacuate 3000 Taliban overnight from Tora Bora, that the Navy was certain they killed Bin Laden, or that General Franks refused to put a battalion of Rangers on the back door (the author does tell us of his understanding that President Bush personally ruled that the back door belonged to the "trusted" Pakistanis).

The author tries hard to be nice to intelligence, but his true bottom line is captured in his description of what they had for him:

1) It's winter in Afghanistan
2) Bin Laden can ride a horse

We all know they had more than that--even with a US Senator blowing the fact that we were listening to Bin Laden's cell phones and satellite phones--but the reality is that CIA could meet with the warlords but did not have actual people within the tribes and on the ground as the Pakistani ISI did.

The author also makes clear that it was just as hard to figure out the friendly situation as it was the enemy situation. From where I sit, "total battlefield awareness" is a pipe dream--a fraud--and it's time we started refocusing on humans that can live up to the Gunny Poole "Tiger's Way."

Here I my notes, ending with my conclusions and ten books I recommend in partnership with this one.

Early on the role of snipers, and the possible uses of snipers if we could get bureaucrats and politicians out of the way, impress me.

Small teams with a forward air controller that can go deep and stay for days impress me, very much. Unfortunately, we don't field them.

Author reinforces the concept of Irregular Warfare as bottom-up thinking in which every person has a say, but takes pains to distinguish this from leadership, with the self-effacing comment that the leaders will decide after the enlisted personnel tell the leaders what they need to know.

Early on he laments to misplacing of the Special Operations "truths," the first one being "Humans are more important than hardware." Today privates are being selected for special operations right out of boot camp, and between private military contractors being allowed to loot the public treasury of both money and skilled manpower, and the complete dismissal of all standards, one can sense the author's thoughts between the lines: DELTA is the last vestige of "true" special forces (although I would include SEALs and some special air).

Air Force air strikes were not great--1 out of 3 hit the target, and the so-called super bomb, the BLU-82, did not explode as advertised.

Bin Laden's "order of battle" was surmised to be an inner circle of Saudis, Yemenis, and Egyptians, with an outer circle of Afghans, Algerians, Jordanians, Chechnyans, and Pakistanis.

Taliban liked to wear black on black...I could not help being reminded of the Viet-Cong.

Terrain blocked our radios. General Clark and others have made it clear that we are not trained, EQUIPPED, or organized for mountain operations, and between this point, and the personal knowledge I have of how few special Chinooks we have that can operate above 12,000 feet--and only because their CWO pilots have learned to fart into the fuel--it's clear the US is not serious about mountain or jungle warfare, and marginally competent as urban warfare.

After seven days they were out of batteries and water.

There was a "surrender" gambit when they got close, the primary purpose being to keep an Afghan warlord between Bin Laden and the Americans.

We still have total disconnect between ground troop use of grids on a map, and Air Force demand for latitude and longitude. The $150 GPS conversion is great, Navy and Air Force still not joint.

Lovely account of how they did a field hire of a seeming gift from heaven, a second translator who spoke English, only to learn later he also spoke Arabic and had been sent as a penetration. Sidebar on Pakistani penetration of the Afghan group they were with.

No mules. Very very tough to resupply in the mountains in winter. Even without loads, four kilometers on one occasion took five hours.

Bin Laden evidently wrote his will on the 14th of December, coincident with his rather desperate sounding call over the radio to all to arm their women and children.

We dropped 1100 "precision" bombs and $550 "dumb" bombs on Tora Bora, plus tens of thousands of rounds of other artillery and ammunition. I am so reminded of Viet-Nam, where what we paid for artillery shells being fired could have bought every Vietnamese a two-story cinderblock house with electricity and running water.

Author concludes that the CIA model of buying warlords DOES NOT WORK for specific objectives.

I learn for the first time that a visit was made to Tora Bora after the fact, a forensic visit. [He know from Bin Laden's later emergence that he did get out.]

The author is scathingly critical of the Army Center for Army Lessons Learned, which has exactly one hit on Tora Bora against thousands of documents visible via the web.

What I learned from this:

DELTA is over-trained and under-utilized.
Conventional Army leaders have no idea how to use special forces in advance of operations or deep behind enemy lines--they simply do not have the mind-set.
CIA paramilitary and some clandestine needs to be transferred into a new Active Measures Command that is the dark and dirty side of Irregular Warfare.

Fine book! See also:
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterrorist Unit
About Face: Odyssey of an American Warrior
Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
The Tunnels of Cu Chi
War Without Windows: A True Accout of a a Young Army Officer Trapped in an Intelligence Cover-Up in Vietnam.

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A Military Failure Caused by Higher Ups!

Dalton Fury (a pseudonym for the mission commander and book author) himself characterized his mission as a military failure. Unlike the old surgery joke ("The operation was a success, but the patient died."), however, in this instance the operation was a failure, but the "patient" (bin Laden) lived.

The task ended up in the hands of about 40 Delta Force, a dozen commandos from the British Special Boat Services, another dozen Green Berets, six CIA operatives, and a few U.S.A.F. special tactics commandos - augmented by high-flying air force support, and hindered by Afghanistan mercenaries of questionable loyalty that especially did not like to fight in the dark. Certainly nothing near the overwhelming force General Powell liked to see.

Legend has it that the strongest Russian attack on Tora Bora involved 2,000 Russians, another 2,000 Afghan Communists, and 50 attack choppers and MIGS for nearly a week - without success. Bin Laden had tanks, heavy weapons and mortars overlooking the two trails into Tora Bora; use of helicopters was ruled out due to placement of AAA guns and a number of SAM rockets. A more attractive options was to have U.S. forces choppered into Pakistan behind Bin Laden's forces - blocking their escape. His was denied by higher command - believed by author Ron Suskind to be President Bush wanting to trust his new Muslim allies.

The commandos were also denied the option of mining the mountain passes because some allies threatened to back out. American forces did not help themselves by having two chains of command involved (Commandos and Special Forces), using different radio frequencies and sometimes uncoordinated actions that resulted in temporarily halting the hunt for bin Laden at a critical point. Similarly, there was additional confusion and delay caused by dual leadership of Afghan forces, and the almost certain loyalty of locals towards bin Laden.

Dalton Fury believes that introducing a large American force into the Afghan side of Tora Bora would have turned the Afghans against us, but could have been well used behind bin Laden to block escape. Or, perhaps a large number of U.S. paratroopers could have been dropped into the area.

The one thing I didn't like about "Kill Bin Laden" is that it began with a difficult raid one year later to capture an Afghan credited with having helped bin Laden escape - the purpose being to learn exactly what had happened. Unfortunately, readers do not learn any information gained from that effort - undoubtedly Top Secret.

Regardless, once again, total respect for those involved on the front lines - in this case in Afghanistan.

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Definitive account of a critical moment

Enjoyed the first hand account, respect to the author and his mates that took the risk to bring this to light. Certainly heightens my respect for their work and leads to more questions about how this war is being managed.

reviews: page 1, 2

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